Meet the Team

Dani Snyder-Young (Principal Investigator) is an applied theatre facilitator, dramaturg, and audience researcher. Her work focuses on the ways socially engaged performance projects impact their audiences and their participants. She is the author of Privileged Spectatorship: Theatrical Interventions in White Supremacy (2020, Northwestern University Press) and Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Impacting Theatre Audiences: Methods for Studying Change (2022, Routledge). Her community-partnered research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Association for University Women, and the Arts Work Fund for Organizational Development; her community-based devised theatre projects have been performed in New York at the Public Theatre and the HERE Arts Center.

Dr. Michael Arnold Mages is a design researcher and educator who has developed community–focused data-driven deliberative design solutions that connect residents to city, state and federal government for over 20 years. He is the author of Conversational Design: Improving participation and decision-making in public organizations (2024, BIS Publishers). His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Heinz Endowments. He has worked on the Obama White House initiative My Brother’s Keeper, US Department of Veterans Affairs MyVA Communities, with The City of Boston, The City of Pittsburgh, PennDOT, among others. His work on design for deliberative conversations has supported residents planning futures for their communities, patients adhering to their therapies, public school teachers designing their retention, tenure, and promotion systems, and veterans finding gaps in VA services. He is co-director of the Health and Wellness Design Lab, and core faculty for Northeastern University’s Center for Design.

Rahul Bhargava is an educator, researcher, designer, and facilitator who builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data processes. He has created big data research tools to investigate media attention, built hands-on interactive museum exhibits that delight learners of all ages, and run over 100 workshops to build data culture in newsrooms, non-profits, and libraries. Rahul’s participatory work spans across data sculptures, data murals, and data theatre. With Catherine D’Ignazio, he built Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities that introduce learners from various domains to working with data. Rahul has collaborated with a wide range of groups, from the Boston Globe to the St. Paul library system and the World Food Program. His academic work on data literacy, technology, and civic media has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Community Informatics, and been presented at conferences such as IEEE Vis and ICWSM. His museum installations have appeared at the Fuller Craft Museum, Boston Museum of Science, Eyebeam in New York City, and the Tech Interactive in San Jose. Rahul is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University, where he directs the Data Culture Group.

Jonathan Carr is a play director with 20+ years of experience creating theatrical performances in educational and professional settings across the Northeast including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. His directing ranges widely in tone and subject matter, but consistently builds off of the aesthetic foundation of Viewpoints, an improvisational artist training technique. His favorite productions include Proof and Rumors (People’s Choice Spotlight Award) for the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, Largo Desolato and Mayhem at American Repertory Theatre/ Moscow Art Theater School Institute, and The Visit (Villanova University). Selected Northeastern University productions: The Moors, The Antipodes, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Last Five Years, The Phantom Lady, Company, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Billy Witch. MFA in Directing from Columbia University under Anne Bogart, who articulated the Viewpoints for theatre, and Robert Woodruff.

Antonio Ocampo-Guzman, is an actor, director, and teacher originally from Bogotá, Colombia, with 30+ years of bilingual theater workshop facilitation and translation experience.

He is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Northeastern University in Boston, and the current President of the Voice & Speech Trainers Association. Antonio trained as an actor with Teatro Libre and with Shakespeare & Company and received an MFA in Directing, as well as a Graduate Diploma in Voice, from York University, Toronto. He is a Designated Linklater Master Voice Teacher and is the author of La Liberación de la Voz Natural: El Método Linklater (UNAM, 2010).

Dr. Laura Perovich is a design researcher with 15 years of experience in data analysis, physical and performance-based data displays, and community-based research. Her community-based research includes a collaboration with environmental justice communities and advocates in Chelsea, MA, to analyze open source data to create a performative community installation of environmental permit violations by local oil storage facilities. Her research has been published in top human-computer interaction venues (e.g. CHI, VIS, CSCW, TEI) and has received best paper and honorable mention awards.

Dr. Moira Zellner has over 20 years of experience with complex systems participatory modeling to support collaborative policy design and planning. Her academic background lies at the intersection of Urban and Regional Planning, Environmental Science, and Complexity. Her interdisciplinary projects examine how specific policy, technological and behavioral factors influence the emergence and impacts of complex socio-ecological systems problems, where interaction effects make responsibilities, burdens, and future pathways unclear. She also examines how participatory complex systems modeling with stakeholders and decision-makers support collaborative policy exploration, social learning, and system-wide transformation. Moira has taught workshops on these approaches for scientists and decision-makers in the US and abroad. She is dedicated to serving the public through her engaged research and activism.

PhD Student Affiliates

Angelique Motunrayo Folasade Akiya C-Dina is a first-generation Afro-Indigenous embodied theatrical storyteller based in New England. They are a current CAMD PhD student at Northeastern University focusing on Black feminist narratives and embodied theatrical practices through research-based theatre. Her performance credits include: The Inferior Sex (Trinity Repertory Company), Soul Tapes (Brown/Trinity), An Octoroon (Gamm Theatre), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Gamm Theatre), and more. Their other accolades include: KCACTF finalist ’21, National Young Playwright semi-finalist ’21, Ronald McNair scholar ’22, Lime Arts Twenty by Twenty Fringe Playwright’23 and Lin Manuel Miranda fellow ’23, and Company One Volt Lab Playwright ‘24. They also serve as a research and design assistant for two Northeastern and City Of Boston projects. She thanks God, her ancestors, and her Black and Brown Indigenous community for guiding her journey. Ashe, Amen.